In his astoundingly productive career, John O'Hara wrote 402 stories
and 14 novels. Reportedly, he drove fellow staffers at The New Yorker
to fury because he could sit down at a typewriter and just bang away at
the keys nonstop until a finished story rolled out. (These facts
come from John Sacret Young's intro to this book.) I've read several
of the story collections and a couple of the novels (see review
of Appointment in Samarra, which made the Modern Library Top 100 list)
and O'Hara's style is fairly distinctive. He plumbs the faultlines
of society where the slumming rich meet with the aspiring poor. His
stories are driven by dialogue and crisp, witty, trenchant dialogue at
that, much like the hard-boiled private eye novels of Hammett and Chandler.
His tone is cynical; his subjects doomed. You get the sense that
if he knew a pedestrian was about to be run down in front of him, he wouldn't
even turn his head. And after witnessing the accident he'd race to
a typewriter to share the ugly scene with his readers. He is a kind
of an upscale noir writer, a tony purveyor of pulp fiction.

BUtterfield 8 is a roman a clef (based on a real incident) and
you can see why the story appealed to him. On June 8, 1931, the dead
body of a young woman named Starr Faithfull--no seriously, her name was
Starr
Faithfull--was found on Long Beach, Long Island. Subsequent reporting
uncovered a life of easy morals and much time spent in speakeasies and
such piquant details as her childhood molestation by a former mayor of
Boston. Despite rumors of political motives for her murder and a
supposed secret diary, no one was ever charged in her death.

O'Hara recreates her as Gloria Wandrous, and introduces her on the novel's
first page as follows:

On this Sunday morning in May, this girl who later
was to be the cause of a sensation in New York,
awoke much too early for her night before.
One minute she was asleep, the next she was
completely awake and dumped into despair.

This is no happy go lucky flapper he offers up. From that first
despairing morning, when she steals a mink coat from the apartment where
she wakes in order to replace the dress that her date tore off of her the
night before, O'Hara details a brutal, unhappy, ultimately empty life that
spirals down towards the inevitable senseless death.

O'Hara said that in Gloria Wandrous he created Elizabeth Taylor before
there was an Elizabeth Taylor (she starred in a movie version), just as
in Pal Joey, he created Sinatra before Sinatra. In hindsight, the
better comparison is probably to Marilyn Monroe. Regardless, his
portrayal of a city girl on the edge, and of her eventual destruction,
is iconographic and, if it did not create Taylor and Monroe, it certainly
influenced writers from Truman Capote (Breakfast
at Tiffany's) to Jay McInerney (Story
of My Life).

I wouldn't recommend trying to tackle his entire ouvure in one fell
swoop, but you should definitely try out this one, Appointment
in Samarra, From
the Terrace and some of the stories. For my money, the incisive
savagery with which he lays bare his generation should rank him with F.
Scott Fitzgerald.